Trish Bennett, Editor
CIRCLEVILLE – Motorists who access North Court Street at U.S. Route 23 will have to find an alternate route for about a month while crews work to repair the roadway at the railroad underpasses.
Starting Monday, North Court Street will be closed from just north of Bell Station Road to Route 23 and is not expected to reopen until Sept. 4, according to the Pickaway County Engineer’s office.
The project, funded in part by a grant from the Ohio Public Works Commission, will have crews remove the current roadway and the deteriorated materials underneath, rehabilitate or replace the existing drainage systems and rebuild the roadway with compacted stone and asphalt.
“What’s under that asphalt is bricks and concrete from around 1926 or 1927,” said Anthony Neff, chief deputy county engineer. “At those railroad underpasses, that ground just stays saturated, and we’ve asked all we can out of that material.”
The bricks, concrete and drainage system were installed around 1927 as part of the “Columbus-Portsmouth Road” project approved in July of 1926, he said.
Neff said the closure will impact an average of 5,481 vehicles that use that roadway every day.
Once the replacement is completed, Neff said the project also will repave North Court Street from Route 23 to the Circleville city limits, as well as replace guardrails and install two new impact attenuators on both the northbound and southbound sides of the pier that divides North Court Street at the southern railroad underpass.
“This will be done with this same project, but not necessarily the same closure,” Neff said. “When we resurface North Court Street, we won’t need to have the entire road shut down for that.”
The posted detours for northbound traffic will be north on Walnut Creek Pike, then west on state Route 752 to U.S. Route 23.
For southbound traffic, the detour will be to continue south on Route 23 to U.S. Route 22, exit east on Route 22 and north onto North Court Street.
This article originally appeared on The Pickaway News Journal
